[Dovecot] windows imap clients

[Charles Sprickman]

On Mon, 21 Sep 2009, Charles Marcus wrote:

> On 9/21/2009, Charles Sprickman (spork at bway.net) wrote:
>> They've been using Thunderbird for some time and I'm finding the following issues there:
>
> I highly recommend you try the new Thunderbird 3 builds (current is b3 I
> believe)...
>
> It has mucho, much IMAP improvements, too many to go into...

Charles (and Nikolay), thanks very much for pointing me at the TB3 beta.

I installed this on my machine and did some testing and then rolled it out 
for the billing folks.  For the most part it works pretty well.  It does 
now default to storing everything offline.  Full-text searching across all 
boxes is more than fast enough (not as fast as mail.app + spotlight, but 
good enough).

The only gotchas I found were:

-still no good indicator of the status when it's syncing things up - you 
can pull up an "activity monitor" under the "tools" menu, but the bottom 
status line seems to sometimes show the activity, sometimes not.  I could 
find no rhyme or reason to this.  The hard drive activity light was the 
best indicator of an indexing or syncing operation.

-they go and take up a good deal of the toolbar for a nice little search 
box, but offer no option to look anywhere but the selected mailbox within 
this UI element.  Bizarre.  To do searches across multiple boxes you have 
to right-click the account name in the left pane and a new window pops up 
for search criteria AND results.

-A few times I had to manually help the syncing process on the main inbox 
by manually reindexing, quitting and restarting TB.  It would hang at 
20-30 messages in for no apparent reason.

Overall, a huge step up from TB2.  They seem happy with it so far.

Also all this syncing was a nice workout for Dovecot.  It performed 
admirably when I had two machines with 3 different XP users all syncing 
the same account.  Bottleneck seemed to be the client, which is good (for 
Timo).

Thanks,

Charles

> -- 
>
> Best regards,
>
> Charles
>